Learning Exchange Server 2003

Learning Exchange Server 2003 Description:
Title: Learning Exchange Server 2003
Author: William Boswell
PublishDate: 2004-09-20
ISBN: 032122874X
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

  

      Description:  
Preface: Learning Exchange Server 2003 Learning Exchange Server 2003 Preface Thanks for taking a moment to browse this book. It is intended to guide a system administrator with at least a year of experience with Windows servers, Active Directory, and networking through the deployment of an enterprise messaging system based on Exchange Server 2003. It does not assume that you have any prior experience with Exchange or any other messaging server. It also does not make any assumptions about the size of your organization. You might be the sole administrator for a small firm or a service technician working for a Value Added Reseller (VAR), or a member of an Exchange team in a large company. The challenges are the same, really. The only difference is the scale of the project and the resources you have at your disposal. Administrators in smaller firms often have to fend for themselves, which adds to the difficulty of dealing with Exchange issues if you re new to messaging. If you belong to an Exchange team, you can draw on the experience of your colleagues, but this book will help you get up to speed as quickly as possible so you can contribute your fair share and avoid making mistakes. If you re flipping through pages in a bookstore, or browsing content online, you ll notice that this book takes a slightly different approach to learning Exchange than other references. In addition to the standard how-to guides and feature descriptions, you ll find detailed process analysis and discussions about underlying concepts and dependencies. That s because Exchange is rich with complex ties to other Windows services and a variety of network components. My hope is that you ll come to see Exchange as an organic part of an overall communications infrastructure rather than just an e-mail server in a rack. The chapters are arranged to get you up and running quickly and they expose layers of detail as you progress. Each topic contains elements to help you design and configure a particular set of features, streamline your daily operations, diagnose problems, safeguard data, and evaluate third-party applications and tools. The topic elements include Protocols and processes used by Exchange, Active Directory, and the Windows operating system to fulfill critical messaging functions. Design specifications and constraints you ll need to observe when performing a task. Security practices that help you prevent system compromise. Precautions and prerequisites to ensure reliable operations. Procedures that describe, step-by-step, how to perform each critical task and assess the results. Monitoring and management suggestions to help you ensure ongoing system functionality. Troubleshooting hints to help guide you through isolating and correcting problems. The topics are structured so that you can choose to skip over low-level details, jump right to the step-by-step procedures, and then flip back if you have questions. As you work your way through the book, I urge you to perform the procedures and tests in each topic. They re designed for use both in lab testing as well as for production deployment. Chapter 1 describes how to use virtual machines to build a lab with all the servers and clients you need to test the major features of Exchange. The most important thing to do is to have fun. An e-mail administrator provides a vital service that nearly everyone appreciates, even if they complain to you on a regular basis. If you keep the e-mail servers stable, deliver features that help your users do their jobs efficiently, and avoid losing messages from (or to) bosses and clients, you ll be everybody s best friend. Good luck. Acknowledgments I would not have been able to write this book without help from many extraordinary people who lent their time, talent, and expertise to the project. I want to take this opportunity to introduce them and to thank them individually and collectively. The project team at Addison-Wesley did a phenomenal job. Sondra Scott originally championed the book and convinced me that readers wanted a fresh approach. Elizabeth Zdunich took over from Sondra and shepherded the book through final production. Take a minute, if you would, and read through the names of the production staff listed in the first pages of the book. These are people who love technical books and who work under crushing deadlines to make sure that their titles contribute innovative and technically sound ideas to the marketplace. I m unbelievably lucky to have the chance to work with them. Thanks to a ground-breaking program put together by Susan Bradley at Microsoft, I was able to draw upon the expertise of some of the best and the brightest in the Exchange product development team, product support team, field consulting team, and documentation team. Teresa Appelgate, User Education Specialist and author/contributor for many Exchange white papers, fielded my piles of questions and spent lots of time helping to find the right person with the right answer. I got a great deal of information from Per Farny, National Practices Consultant in the Microsoft Consulting Services Enterprise Messaging team; Tejas Patel, an Exchange server specialist in the Messaging Support group; Christopher Budd, CISSP and author of Microsoft s Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide ; and Brad Clark, a program manager for Exchange. You can gripe all you want about Microsoft as a corporate entity, but these folks are superstars and I m grateful for their help. I was also fortunate to have an incredible group of tech reviewers. Barrie Sosinsky and David Chun reviewed the manuscript from the point of view of experienced system administrators who want to learn about Exchange from the ground up. Not only did I benefit from their fresh perspective, they also did a great job of ferreting out glitches in my descriptions that might stymie a newcomer. Barrie was especially generous with his time and became an ardent spokesman for harried administrators everywhere. Neil Hobson and William Lefkovics, consultants who have earned Microsoft s prestigious Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status in recognition of their expertise and willingness to support the Exchange community, did me the honor of giving the manuscript a careful read. They shared their wealth of knowledge about Exchange design and operation, troubleshooting tools, and third-party products. They also demonstrated a truly scary mastery of the Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles on Exchange. Their feedback is present on nearly every page of the book. I invite you to read their contributions in the MS Exchange blog, [a href="http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange" target="_blank">http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange . Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.